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hissing lawns is 1 year old

hissing lawns was founded in early September 2013, but the 1st anniversary caught me unawares. So I’m a little too late for a proper celebration.

For years I had been telling local writers, college students, and music fans that Savannah needed another music blog — hardly an original idea. But no one started a site like the one I envisioned, so I launched this blog with the dim hope that others would join as contributors and/or readers.

When I registered the domain, I didn’t realize just how few people would recognize the reference to Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns, but if I had to do it over again, I’d pick the same name. I love the symbolism of it. You can decide on its meaning for yourself.

We’ve had some down days and even down weeks in terms of traffic, but in a short 1 year hissing lawns has established itself as a vital forum for chronicling the Savannah music scene. I read a lot of music blogs, and I’d say our content — especially the photography — stands up pretty well compared to sites around the country, including many that have been operating for years.

And we have room to grow. Maybe you can help.

We have five really active contributors right now, but it would be great to have two or three times that many. Four of us regularly post photo galleries (just look over at the gallery thumbnails in the sidebar), but I’d like to see a lot more images here too.

Going forward, we’d like to make sure that at least 50% of the posts have a specific Savannah connection, but right now we’re at 90% or more. That means we could use more record and concert reviews, festival coverage, streams of new music, and so forth and so on. We’d like to see more local coverage too. Right now, we are heavy on male voices on the site (not that there’s anything wrong with that!), and we tend to have a lot of coverage from the heavier end of the spectrum — metal, hardcore, punk. We also post a fair amount about various southern and Americana-ish acts. Those tendencies are encouraged by the general Americana and metal focus of The Jinx, the venue where our contributors probably spend more combined time than any other.

Given the prevalence of metal and Americana in the Savannah scene, we could even have more coverage of those styles, while also adding coverage of hip-hop, blues, soul, pop rock, etc, We’d like to have more coverage of venues outside the downtown area, more coverage of very young acts and of acts that have been around for years. In other words, we’d like more of everything.